The period between 1660 and 1785 was a time
of amazing expansion for England — or
for "Great Britain," as the nation
came to be called after an Act of Union in 1707
joined Scotland to England and Wales. Britain
became a world power, an empire on which the
sun never set. But it also changed internally.
The world seemed different in 1785. A sense
of new, expanding possibilities — as well
as modern problems — transformed the daily
life of the British people, and offered them
fresh ways of thinking about their relations
to nature and to each other. Hence literature
had to adapt to circumstances for which there
was no precedent. The topics in this Restoration
and Eighteenth Century section of Norton Topics
Online review crucial departures from the past
— alterations that have helped to shape
our own world.

One
lasting change was a shift in population from
the country to the town. "A Day in Eighteenth-Century
London" shows the variety of diversions
available to city-dwellers. At the same time,
it reveals how far the life of the city, where
every daily newspaper brought new sources of
interest, had moved from traditional values.
Formerly the tastes of the court had dominated
the arts. In the film Shakespeare in Love,
when Queen Elizabeth's nod decides by itself
the issue of what can be allowed on the stage,
the exaggeration reflects an underlying truth:
the monarch stands for the nation. But the
eighteenth century witnessed a turn from palaces
to pleasure gardens that were open to anyone
with the price of admission. New standards
of taste were set by what the people of London
wanted, and art joined with commerce to satisfy
those desires. Artist William Hogarth made
his living not, as earlier painters had done,
through portraits of royal and noble patrons,
but by selling his prints to a large and appreciative
public. London itself — its beauty and
horror, its ever-changing moods — became
a favorite subject of writers.

The
sense that everything was changing was also
sparked by a revolution in science. In earlier
periods, the universe had often seemed a small
place, less than six thousand years old, where
a single sun moved about the earth, the center
of the cosmos. Now time and space exploded,
the microscope and telescope opened new fields
of vision, and the "plurality of worlds," as
this topic is called, became a doctrine endlessly
repeated. The authority of Aristotle and Ptolemy
was broken; their systems could not explain
what Galileo and Kepler saw in the heavens
or what Hooke and Leeuwenhoek saw in the eye
of a fly. As discoveries multiplied, it became
clear that the moderns knew things of which
the ancients had been ignorant. This challenge
to received opinion was thrilling as well as
disturbing. In Paradise Lost, Book 8,
the angel Raphael warns Adam to think about
what concerns him, not to dream about other
worlds. Yet, despite the warning voiced by
Milton through Raphael, many later writers
found the new science inspiring. It gave them
new images to conjure with and new possibilities
of fact and fiction to explore.

Meanwhile,
other explorers roamed the earth, where they
discovered hitherto unknown countries and ways
of life. These encounters with other peoples
often proved vicious. The trade and conquests
that made European powers like Spain and Portugal
immensely rich also brought the scourge of
racism and colonial exploitation. In the eighteenth
century, Britain's expansion into an empire
was fueled by slavery and the slave trade,
a source of profit that belied the national
self-image as a haven of liberty and turned
British people against one another. Rising
prosperity at home had been built on inhumanity
across the seas. This topic, "Slavery
and the Slave Trade in Britain," looks
at the experiences of African slaves as well
as at British reactions to their suffering
and cries for freedom. At the end of the eighteenth
century, as many writers joined the abolitionist
campaign, a new humanitarian ideal was forged.
The modern world invented by the eighteenth
century brought suffering along with progress.
We still live with its legacies today.